Business Development Note: What are our main areas of Research and Development?

(following the previous post)

In general, we have touched upon:

industrial design

seating and furniture design ergonomics (focusing on knowing how to both make things more, and less comfortable depending on the application)

process engineering

we also push the limit on figuring out how low we can staff a shift, so that there is some fresh food available even when only one person runs the shop

supply-chain IT

menu, inventory management, and costing architecture, such that there is a Lego-style menu that customers can use to order anything they want, and combos are just presets on top of that API, and costing is just automatically computed based on the API backend; basically this has let us test a huge menu which we know is infinitely scalable upwards... and if it's scaled down, we know we can deploy a limited set of it in any type of shop with a more limited menu; (pasta shop, ice cream shop, pancake shop, sandwich shop, etc. pretty much overnight)

energy consumption in HVACR

earlier in 2019 I started picking up the basics of how to assemble/disassemble our refrigerators and air conditioners; I look forward to a time when we may have a workshop to build more efficient ACs with; why bother? Energy is our largest cost after goods, services, and rent. I have a huge backlog of work here that I have to park, rn as this is more cost-control, and I need to go work on software (see below) to help drive our topline opportunities

a small digital advertising issue

due to my being banned from social media, I had to develop Google Ads practice in FY3/FY4... we have extensive quantities of ads running, so explaining what goes on here is an entire talk of its own; different segments, targets, and creative work are involved; one of the dumb/interesting things we do is bet against Google's prices on an hourly basis using bots... by default Google only lets you auto-optimise by day, but as we are brick and mortar 24-7, we have to tweak our bids hourly so that our spend is distributed across every hour of the day in precise correlation with available audiences... instead of all our ads showing up during the one hour when ads are cheapest

more software development

right now we've managed to get away from having a website for four years; we use a Google Ads optimised Google site, but I can't do analytics or launch features / apps / much CMS on that... and since we only have about 30 MAN HOURS PER YEAR for software development, I'm trying to set up some software infrastructure that we can use to be productive given the very limited resources. This is another rather huge domain to be talked about.

To be honest,

the strain of running the business this way is very high... but it is the best I can do given the cards I have. :)